Red Faction made a great debut on next-gen consoles with
Guerilla in 2009, bursting onto the third-person shooter scene with an explosive edge and a fun story set on Mars, but now the initial surprise we're left with quite a half-hearted offering in
Armageddon two years on. The plot takes place some time after its predecessor, dealing with long tread science-fiction elements like terraforming and radiation fallout- sufficed to say, it's almost taken as a given that you have played another of the four games in the
RF series, a risky assumption and one that will cost the title a lot of its charm for newcomers. That would perhaps be okay if the gameplay had seen some major developments since
Guerilla, yet I was hard pressed to find any big differences between the two entries upon trying this. Now, for those series veterans who, like fans of
Call of Duty, are able to overlook the lack of innovation and real change simply because it's a franchise they love, this will probably not matter too much, however I think for the rest of the gaming world our expectation of developers to make full use of the two years inbetween sequels is a warranted one, so that Volition Inc seem to have made so little effort to differentiate
Armageddon from other
Faction titles makes it feel more lazy and repetitive as a result. A new exosuit called the LEO gets a few cool sequences, but they're certainly not enough to really distinguish this from
Guerilla or indeed many other shooters. We're left ultimately with a package that feels no different from its predecessors, whose only real incentive for purchase lies in the fact that the game is already nearing half price on game shelves- which is never a good sign...
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